MacKenzie Phillips: Father's Death Was Like A Majestic Oak Falling (VIDEO)

VH1's 'Celebrity Rehab' kicked off its third season Thursday night, and it appears to have been filmed a while back. The cast includes Mackenzie Phillips, who claimed to be eight months sober at the time. Dr. Drew asks her about her father, but just about the toll his addiction and death took on Mackenzie--not the other traumatic stuff.

The loving and wistful way Mackenzie talks about her late father, Mamas and Papas singer John Phillips, is eery, considering the shocking revelations that would soon come. She tells Dr. Drew about the distance that swelled between them in recent years.

"My relationship with my father changed a lot and became not quite as codependent, not quite as constant," she said. "He remarried and I didn't really see a lot of him."

She said his death in 2001 came as no great surprise since he continued to drink excessively after a liver transplant. Still, "It was like watching a great tree fall. That's what it felt like, a majestic old oak."

The loss of her father left Mackenzie turned inward and subject to "huge crying jags." In September she went on Oprah to reveal that she and her father shared a ten-year sexual relationship that began when she was 19, after he shot her up with drugs on the eve of her first wedding.

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